“The world's intellectual property system is broken, stopping lifesaving technologies from reaching the people who need them most in developed and developing countries, according to a report released in Ottawa today by an international coalition of experts.”
So says the grandiosely entitled “International Expert Group on Biotechnology, Innovation and Intellectual Property.” But, in fact, the majority of these self-anointed experts hail not from international biotech hot-spots like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune but from various Canadian universities. And since the report was funded by the Canadian government, the “study” is really the perspective of the policy establishment in Canada, a nation that isn’t exactly known as a hotspot of IP production.
So why did it take an unprecedented seven years (of Canadian taxpayer funding) to rehash old controversies with little new, empirical data?
If the authors were seeking to comprehensively examine whether or not intellectual property serves to get “lifesaving technologies to people who need them most in developing countries,” they might have at least acknowledged Golden Rice, a project critical to fighting malnutrition in developing countries, where patents were NOT an impediment to the dissemination of a key technology, and in fact were critical in putting together all the pieces of the puzzle to serve an important humanitarian purpose.
In reality, it is not intellectual property, but rather regulatory constraints, taxes and tariffs, and non-science biases that pose the greater threat to dissemination of life-saving technologies needed to benefit developed and developing countries alike.
So much for the IP oracles of the Great White North. You hosers.